Restaurant ordered to stop selling pizzas topped with venom

A Zurich-based chef is upset the Swiss government has ordered him to stop selling one of his pizza specialties ─ venom topped pizza.

According to the Croatian Times, Ismail Ertekin creates pizzas topped with poisonous venom from spiders, scorpions and snakes, but health officials in Switzerland have banned this "recipe".

U.K.-based publication Orange News reports the chef says the tiny amounts of venom he uses as pizza toppings come from homeopathic remedies. He's upset that health officials no longer allow him to make these pizzas, and they've ordered him to remove them off the menu at his restaurant, Avanti.

Environmental Health Officer Ferdinand Uehli told Orange News, "Medicinal products are not food stuffs and are not allowed to be an ingredient in food. Therefore we had to ban the pizzas. The pizza in reality contained very little poison."

"Preservatives in foods are much more damaging than my poison pizzas," Ertekin said. About the poison-topped pizzas he said, "They were really popular, especially with people who have a phobia of spiders or snakes. They used the pizza as a way to get over their fears," he said.

Gawker notes Ertekin recently made headlines when he promoted pizza topped with 24 carat gold that was edible.